Passing Life, Playing Dead: Zombification as Juridical Shapeshifting in Pedro Cabiya’s Malas hierbas

Abstract

This essay explores how the classic narrative of Haitian zombification is refashioned within a postcolonial Haitian-Dominican context as a passing narrative in Pedro Cabiya’s 2011 science fantasy novel Malas hierbas. In its depiction of a nameless zombie scientist who pretends to be a living being and successfully assimilates into the community of the living without detection, Cabiya’s text not only departs from the traditional zombie archetype. It also unfolds as a philosophical exploration of what it means to be alive when one is born into a political ontology that has always already defined and marked some as dead. Interrogating the disjuncture between the vital signs of life codified in Western scientific discourse and the zombie’s simulation of life, the essay argues that Malas hierbas adapts the trope of racial passing to show how the meaning of life moves from ontology of existence to a category of identity, like race, legal personhood, and citizenship. Situating the novel in its Haitian and Dominican contexts, where race constitutes markers of national identity and juridical status, the essay connects the zombie’s passing life to contemporary representations of Haitians as impostors who must play dead, on both sides of Hispaniola, as a means of survival.